by Elske Rahill
She was about to hang up when his voice came low and steady. ‘Dine. Get that journalist out of my mother’s house.’
‘Billy is a friend, Louis. We are helping Bomama to write Bompa’s reply.’
‘There will be no reply.’
‘Well Louis, Bomama would like to write a reply, and we are helping her.’
After a pause, he pronounced, ‘I am the head of this family.’ Some loyalty to her grandmother stirred with embarrassment for him; the steadiness in his voice, and each word spoken deadpan like a magic spell that might conjure him into greatness. She could hear him suck a breath before he said it again, ‘I am the head of this family.’ This time he said it in protest and yearning and bald insistence, like a brave child, ‘...and you, Dine, are way down the pecking order.’
‘The pecking order, Louis?’
Dine remembered it suddenly – one summer when Uncle Louis shaved the moustache. She saw his naked upper lip, a wavy, hurt-looking thing, flinching like a snail.
Billy was looking up at Dine from his downturned head. Her grandmother was moving her gaze eagerly from Dine’s face to her own hands, to Dine’s face, and back to her hands where she had drawn blood by scratching at the thin skin of the age spot.
‘Dine,’ Louis said, ‘I am giving you twenty minutes to leave my mother’s house, with your faggot friend. I am coming now and if you are still there when I arrive...’
‘Yes, Louis?’
‘You will regret it.’
When Dine hung up, her grandmother said, ‘Well. Louis is a special one. Many people do not understand him very well. It caused Theo to wonder a lot, you know. Where did we get him from?’
She would often say, ‘There is something in Louis, that people don’t often see...’ Her favourite proof was, ‘You know he built half an airplane, once?’
For Dine this had once added an exciting dimension to her strange uncle. He was a teenager when he built it, and it was still in the shed. ‘Ask him to show you,’ Bomama would say, but Uncle Louis had a way of raising his eyebrows if anyone spoke to him, as though to demonstrate how unimpressed he was, how unsurprised he would be by anything they might try on him.
On Dine’s phone a text came up:
Dine this is Bertha. Do not be flattered and tricked by that journalist. Do not be naïve and lured into a trap. We have hired the most expensive PR team in the country. Please stay out of it or you will regret it.
With a surge of pride Dine wrote,
Is naked propaganda really the way to go?
When Bomama spoke of that plane, the grandchildren imagined baked-bean cans rolled out and soldered together to form the body; skeletal bat wings covered in parchment, Uncle Louis an unlikely genius, twiddling tiny cogs and bolts, fashioning an engine from old bikes and bits of oven. When they finally snuck to the garage to look, they left quickly in silent disappointment. It turned out he had bought the parts and assembled the plane like a very expensive Lego kit; no wings, just the nose.
Billy looked into the bottom of his mug. ‘Mrs Tack, would you like to leave it for today?’
‘Leave it? Oh no. No I will reply. I have the right to reply, you know? Theo made sure of it. But we should be quick you know, my son Louis has some funny ideas. Always buying. Theo said we gave him too much money. You know he has a fish tank that makes the wall of his kitchen? Tropical fish in it. Poor Louisje.’
Billy rewound his tape and placed the recorder back in the middle of the table.
‘Okay,’ he said, ‘remember this is a reply, so try, if you can, to answer each of the suspicions that Mac Mahon has raised.’
‘You should have known him.’
*
Lola had offered to come to the office with him, but Louis dropped her at the crossroads near her house, ignoring her pout and sigh. He would put an end to all that Lola nonsense soon. Not today – he hadn’t the energy for it – but soon.
He swiped his ID card at the staff entrance and made his way across the lobby, head down to avoid the gaze of his father’s portrait. An old, slow-shutter black-and-white picture taken in the garden while he sniffed at some knobbled twig, his eyes serious and his lips breaking a smile, it was a thing Louis regretted the moment he first saw it installed. He had done it for his mother, though, because his father had died only six months before the new lab was finished. Perhaps it was also for the sentimental nagging that came with his father’s death, the guilt at the perfect revenge that fate had wrought on him. That the man who could never suffer fools should be reduced to a kicking infant had given Louis more satisfaction than he could reckon with. The portrait was as high as a man, each pixel impregnated in plastic resin. It was mostly for her that he had done it, but when his mother saw it she had said to him, ‘Well Got verdomme Louisje, where did you get such flashy taste from?’
As he mounted the stairs, Louis ran his fingers along the metallic wipe-down walls. He was proud of the impersonal functionality of the new building – the faintly green walls and the hospital smell that meant business.
His parents had started their firm at home in the back room. They maintained a desperate intimacy with their staff – loaning them money, cooking them lunch. His mother even cleaned the house of the handyman when his wife was ill, and when the itinerant girl whom they hired cheap as a lab assistant said she was moving to Liverpool, his father made his way to the caravan site, dressed in his brown suit, head high on that skinny neck, believing, like some fool, that he could talk the family into letting her stay. Oblivious to his thick accent and foreign head, his father always thought he could set his own rules, deaf to snickers and blind to sneers, and retreating always into a sterile stoicism. These were the humiliations that had punctuated Louis’s teen years, but by then his family name was known all over the country, and being a Tack was something to be proud of. It got him onto the rugby team, and they had so much money that he had his own car to drive to school in.
His sisters didn’t remember what it was like at the beginning. Their parents worked all day and much of the night and Mammy went without medicine sometimes, because an order was worth more than her own health. At first it was just them: Mammy mixing and typing and posting and filing and delivering; Daddy weeding and planting, writing advertisements and phoning, visiting the pharmacies and coming home with a grin for every tiny sale. Bitters was the thing they had started with – a complex goo of twenty-two herbs and roots. It was fermented for eight weeks and every day his mother turned each bottle at a certain angle according to the moon. For years, the hotpress was full of bitters. The smell of it, solemn as bile, thickened the air of that windowless back room. They got a secretary in first, and a delivery man, but still his mother did all the disinfecting and chopping and mixing. The palms of her hands were scratched and yellow from powdering roots.
There were colleagues who thought Louis had been handed a golden goose for nothing. There were those, Louis knew, who sneered at nepotism and his graduate degree, but they did not know how he had paid. Louis had taken nothing from his father that he had not earned with his mother’s absence and exhaustion, with the strangle-ache of those nights he woke to find her downstairs with a single lamp, still in her house frock, still crushing and chopping and measuring according to his father’s instructions, her hands fluttering up when he startled her. ‘Oh Louisje darling...’ kneading the cold from her hip as she kissed him, then knitting while she watched him drink his camomile, the fine grey needles clacking softly and the socks towering down around and around beneath her hands. The stench of flax seeds boiling to molten glue on the camping stove.
And he’d laboured for his inheritance – all those afternoons he’d spent harvesting herb leaves and scraping the dirt from the roots – never quickly enough, and never cleanly enough for his father. Then the quiet days in the living room with his little sisters, a jigsaw that spelled CAT, paper airplanes made from old invoices to shush the girls because Daddy was researching, or Daddy was angry over a spoiled batch, or Daddy was
showing the garden to a client. Louis’s father may not have been a Nazi, but he was certainly a tyrant, and Louis had paid for his life’s wealth in his mother’s flushing cheeks, her pushed-down tears, the sneaking she did, back then, to make it seem she had enough when she did not – dandelion salad for her supper, water in the milk, the dregs of the teapot to bathe her eyes.
He had not told his mother – there was no need, she need never find out – that they would be discontinuing their signature Tack Bitters. The concoction must have worked at some time, for some reason, but along the way they had tweaked it here or there, and at last the mixture had lost its power. Few bought it now, and those who did sent letters to say that it tasted like tar and stained their teeth and did nothing to cure them.
His mother had given everything to his father’s name. All of this stuff in the papers would upset her terribly, he knew, and she should be kept out of it. He had warned Bertha not to get hysterical, and he had tried to speak to Mammy on the phone – ‘Yes yes Louisje...’ – it was the voice she used to respond to his father’s rants, not listening but only soothing, ‘Yes Theo, yes,’ the blush climbing her cheeks, the way she hurried the conversation closed – ‘Yes, yes Louisje...’ It was as if his father was at her shoulder, for it was the same yessing she did always for Daddy, smoothing things over, tucking things away, agreeing with everyone.
On the second flight of stairs Louis wondered why he hadn’t taken the lift – he was eager to find the file and get that troublemaker out of his mother’s house. The eldest grandchild, Dine, had always been an attention-seeking, interfering little bitch, but somehow she had his mother wrapped around her finger. She was his sister Josephine’s. Josephine had her young, and it was his mother who ended up minding her. As soon as she was born her picture appeared all over his parents’ house. This was followed by lumps of clay, rocks painted like ladybirds, framed certificates for one thing or another. The two often spoke intimately together, heads bowed, and at his father’s funeral it was Dine who rocked his mother back and forth, back and forth as she wept.
His sister Bertha told him that she had often seen their mother pay for Dine’s taxi like she was some sort of princess. She was always giving her gifts, she even gave her his father’s pen after he had died, and once, he found them at the dining-room table, leafing through a small photo album of his mother’s first child.
Now the girl was studying pharmaceuticals – of course she was – and his mother had told him already that he was to give her a job at the firm.
*
Louis had put on weight. His breath was sore when he reached his office and he had to sit for a moment and take a drink from the water cooler, before searching out the key for the file. The water was so cold it hurt his teeth. That was another thing his mother objected to – the water cooler. She said it was a waste of electricity, and that it was healthier to drink room-temperature water.
After his father’s death, he and his sisters had cleaned out the office. Bertha had suggested, and probably she was right, that it was best to clear out their father’s things now, and do the room up. They had agreed already that they would sell the house after their mother died, and it was best not to have too much work to do on it when the time came. It had given him pleasure to take a blank cardboard box and jumble together all those papers that his father had kept in painstaking order, that careful, slanted handwriting. He told his mother he was keeping them safe, and he had driven straight here to his new, clean office, and pushed the box onto the highest shelf of his file room.
He remembered exactly where the box was – at the very end of the room on the cold metal shelves, a spot labelled ‘Private’. He was panting when he set it down on his desk.
The item at the top was a shock – he had forgotten about that. It was a hardbacked book with lemon-yellow pages and pink lines. There was a white label stuck on the front, and in soft, knife-sharpened pencil his father had written, Louis (III). He did not need to open it, for he knew what was there. His mother knew too. He had seen her peering around the kitchen door as he left his father’s office with the ledger in his hand. He could see by the droop at the corner of her eyes that she knew, but whatever she thought of it all, she would never say.
His father gave it to him the day after his graduation – a miserable event at which his father complained about the uncomfortable chairs, the ‘pomp’, the cold, the vanity of graduation photos, and his mother kept her jaw shut tight, for she had left school at fourteen, and she felt her accent and her knowledge and her dress all wrong for the setting.
Over breakfast the next morning, she told him, ‘Daddy will have his elevenses in the office today, you are to join him.’
When he arrived the tea tray was already there on the desk – an almond finger for his father, some buttered tea biscuits, the metal teapot and the two cups, their gleaming white interiors gaping in their saucers. His father beamed at him.
‘Now, Louis,’ he said, ‘you are a man.’
In the book, his parents had logged every penny they had ever spent on him – new shoelaces, piano lessons, the car.
He did not know why he had kept that book. He pushed it at his wastepaper basket, but it was too wide.
Next in the box was a blue envelope folder made of thin card. The sticker across it said ‘DINE’. It had been written in the same smudging lead, but with a child’s hand. The backwards D had been rubbed out and rewritten. Louis had expected to find the same thing in there – all the taxis and the school fees which, he knew, his parents must have paid for her. But the folder saying ‘DINE’ contained objects of her own authoring: splodgy paintings, handmade birthday cards, scribbled rhymes. There were other folders too – for Bertha and Josephine there were bits of paper that amounted to love letters. His father had written out the funny things they said as children, he had collected photographs of places they had been together: ‘Theo and Bertha a nice day in the Park’; ‘JoJo falls asleep in the Camomile’...
Louis stacked all of these useless things on his desk. He had taken them all from his parents’ house in a post-funeral trance, and now he did not know what to do with them. He should find that letter about the reply. His mother was getting herself all worked up about it.
He hadn’t mentioned all that to the PR team. He would be meeting them later that day, but on the phone the assistant had advised that today’s newspapers were the fish-and-chip wrappers of tomorrow. Often, said the expert, the best thing to do with a scandal was to do nothing – particularly where a business was concerned. People wanted to buy and they wanted to forget any reason not to. Why remind them of something they were already forgetting?
But his niece was there working his mother up into a fret. By the time he arrived she would be all set to go with her reply and there would be no talking her down. He knew how it would go. ‘Yah,’ she would say, ‘yah you are right Louisje.’ But she would go ahead and do what she wanted anyway, and what she wanted was whatever that bony-arsed little bitch told her.
The letter was in its very own folder with ‘TRIBUNE’ written across the front. There were three letters inside, and a clipping from the paper, a picture of Josephine cutting a ribbon. It was the opening of his parents’ first lab. ‘Tack Herbals to Employ 150 Staff Members’, said the headline.
The important letter was there. ‘Right to Reply 1985 Me/Vincent Bell’ was written along the top in his father’s hand.
‘Dear Mr Tack,’ the letter began, ‘I hereby confirm that, should the upcoming interview with our journalist, Tiernach Mac Mahon, result in an article of any sort, or quotes of any sort, this article will first be read by you in order to allow you the opportunity to reply as you see fit. I hereby agree to publish your full reply, notwithstanding...’
Louis did not have much time. His mother would be waiting for him to come, moving to the window with her sore hip, and back again, sitting and standing and rubbing her hands. She would phone him soon, he knew, wondering where he was.
He p
iled them back into the box and brought them down in the lift. Several times he had to set the box on the floor and swipe his card – to activate the lift, to access the lobby... He crossed his father’s giant portrait which was – his mother was right – in poor taste. He balanced the box in one elbow while he swiped himself into the photocopier room. Inside, the air was caustic with paper fibres, toner dust, the eye-tingling ozone from all that photocopying and scanning and faxing. He glanced up at the air vent before letting the door swing shut behind him.
There was a plywood table in the centre of the room, and the walls were lined with grey and white machines – the sleek new colour copier, the laminating press, the humpbacked shredder. Louis set the box on the table and removed the lid. He began with the ledger, and he was surprised how little it hurt as the shredder ate and spat, ate and spewed. One by one the yellow pages went quietly into the great machine.
Dolls
SUZANNE STUCK THE plastic bottle under my nose and said something. A question, but I couldn’t understand it. She sniffed at the open neck and spoke again, her eyes steadying on mine to press at the meaning.
I understood the last word – puew – just because of the way the sound shot out and made her mouth pull high and round as though readying to spit, but I wasn’t going to make that leap of effort.
She had forgotten our appointment. Instead of the ritual sliced apple, pencil and paper that drew me daily from the slippery riversides of that summer, the table held the kind of useless trinkets left over after a car boot sale. For a moment I thought Suzanne was preparing for the vide grenier – attic clearing. My cousins had told me all about it – the day when the neighbours would bring their unwanted clutter to sell in the half-used car park of the village train station. It happened every year, they said; there would be candyfloss and we would be allowed to buy some, and if we went back at the end of the day people would give us things for free. Last year, my cousin Annie had been given a flowering cactus plant, a stag beetle preserved in a cube of resin, and a cheese board with real horn trimmings to give to her mother. She had shown me the insect – a thrilling thing to hold in your hand and turn about under the lamplight. You could see the sorry frailty of its underside and the spectrum of pigments mingling in the black of its shell. I had been hoping to obtain something like it when the time came.